Crime trends in England and Wales and how we measure them

Crime can affect anyone. There are many different types of crime which harm people and society in different ways, while the type and nature of crime is constantly evolving.

Our Centre for Crime and Justice aims to improve understanding of the extent and nature of crime across England and Wales by providing detailed information that can inform policies that tackle crime and assess if they are effective.

We measure crime experienced by people living in England and Wales. We estimate how much crime there is and whether it is rising or falling using two main sources: the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and police recorded crime.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) has been in operation since 1981. Trained interviewers ask people aged 16 years and over residing in households in England and Wales about their experiences of a selected range of crimes in the 12 months prior to interview. Beyond the census, it is one of the biggest household surveys in operation across the country, with the latest estimates from December 2023 based on over 31,000 interviews.

The CSEW has had a consistent methodology over time and provides more than 40 years of comparable data. It is the best source for understanding long-term crime trends at a national level for the offences and population it covers (people living in private households), because it is unaffected by changes in levels of reporting to the police or police recording practices.

In 2009, the CSEW was extended to include children aged 10 to 15 years to provide estimates of victimisation against children.

You can find out more about the CSEW in Section 2 of our User guide to crime statistics.

CSEW headline crime captures a range of personal and household victim-based crime in the interviewer-led parts of the survey including:

• theft
• robbery
• criminal damage
• fraud
• computer misuse
• violence with or without injury

In our quarterly release, Crime in England and Wales, we provide estimates for:

• the number of incidents of CSEW headline crime
• the number of CSEW headline crime victims
• the proportion of the population who experience a CSEW headline crime once or more (prevalence)
• the number of CSEW headline crimes experienced per household or individual (incidence)

Trends in the number of CSEW headline crime incidents to the year ending December 2023

Notes:

1. CSEW data for the year ending December 2022 and December 2023 are not designated as National Statistics.
2. CSEW data are not available for the year ending March 2021 because the Crime Survey for England and Wales was suspended because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
3. Estimates are statistically significant at the 5% level.

Download the data for trends in the number of CSEW headline crime incidents to the year ending December 2023 (XLSX, 35KB)

It is important to note that domestic violence reported in the interviewer-led parts of the CSEW is prone to significant under-reporting, because many victims will not be willing to disclose such incidents in the context of an in-home face-to-face personal interview. For this reason, our preferred measure of domestic violence comes from the survey’s domestic abuse self-completion module, which are presented in our annual Domestic abuse in England and Wales bulletin.

Experiences of sexual assault, stalking and harassment are presented in our Sexual offences victim characteristics article, Stalking: findings article and Experiences of harassment in England and Wales bulletin. Standalone survey modules are used to gather information from respondents about these highly sensitive crimes in a different way to other crimes, and the data are captured and processed separately and are not directly comparable. For these crimes (and domestic abuse), we only present estimates related to the number of victims and the proportion of the population who were victims once or more (prevalence) because of difficulty with calculating the number of times a respondent has been victimised in these modules.

Trends in the prevalence of experiences of sexual assault and stalking, to year ending March 2023

Notes:

1. See notes from previous chart
2. The category “any sexual assault” include attempts.
3. Data for the year ending March 2023 are based on eight months of data collection because of an error in the survey, which resulted in missing data. Caution should be taken when using these data because of the impact of the reduced data collection period on the quality of the estimates.
4. Data for stalking are not available for the year ending March 2008 because comparable questions were not included in that year.

Download the data for trends in the prevalence of experiences of sexual assault and stalking, to year ending March 2023 (XLSX, 35KB)

The CSEW also measures a range of perception-related measures and other crime-related experiences, such as anti-social behaviour and attitudes towards the police.

See our Guide to finding crime statistics for further information on the statistics that we publish as well as how to find crime statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Because the CSEW is a household survey, it excludes crimes against:

• commercial or public sector bodies
• tourists
• non-household populations, such as care home residents and those who are homeless

It also excludes crimes against society, such as drug possession or public order offences, and does not cover homicide because it is based on the responses of victims.

Although the CSEW has a large sample size and provides reliable estimates for high-volume crimes, for rare crimes (such as robbery), where there are relatively small numbers of victims, there can be some variance in CSEW estimates from year to year.

Police recorded crime covers offences reported to and recorded by the police. The data is supplied to the Home Office from the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales and the British Transport Police. These figures provide a good measure of police activity – what is reported to them and what they are dealing with.

Police recorded crime has wider coverage than the CSEW because it covers all offences against the total population (including non-household populations), as well as crimes against businesses and crimes against society. However, it is important to note that trends in police recorded crime are influenced by changes in recording practices, which have had a particularly large impact on the recording of violent crime over the last 10 years. Trends are also affected by changes in police activity and changes in victim’s willingness to report a crime to the police.

Police recorded crime does, however, provide a good measure of offences that are well-reported and well-recorded by the police. It is the better source for some low volume crimes that the CSEW does not capture, such as homicide and offences involving a knife or sharp instruments. These can be seen in our Homicide in England and Wales articles and our Crime in England and Wales: other related tables dataset. It also acts as a complimentary source of data for those low volume crimes that are subject to variance in the CSEW, such as robbery.

Trends in the number of police recorded crime offences to the year ending December 2023

Notes

1. Police recorded crime are not designated as National Statistics.
2. Data on knife or sharp instrument offences exclude Greater Manchester Police for the whole timeseries back to the year ending March 2011 and exclude Devon and Cornwall Police for the years ending December 2022 to December 2023.
3. Police recorded crime figures are not subject to significance testing as they are counts, not estimates. You can find out more about police recorded crime in Section 3 of our User guide to crime statistics.

Download the data for trends in the number of police recorded crime to the year ending December2023 (XLSX, 35KB)

Measuring crime is complex and it can be difficult to know which source of data provides the best insight into levels of crime and trends over time. The CSEW and police recorded crime data have varying strengths and limitations depending on the crime type being measured.

There is no one single measure for measuring trends for overall crime. The CSEW and police recorded crime are best used together to develop a more complete picture. CSEW headline crime provides the best measure for a range of crimes against individuals living in private households. However, these figures should be complimented using measures from the CSEW standalone modules for more sensitive crimes that cannot be captured in the interviewer-led parts of the survey, such as sexual assault, as well as police recorded crime for offences that the survey does not capture, such as homicide and offences involving knives or sharp instruments.

The long-term falls for CSEW headline crime (excluding fraud and computer misuse) have been reported consistently since the mid-1990s. These long-term falls were also reflected in victim-based crimes recorded by the police from the year ending March 2003 to the year ending March 2014, after which improvements in police recording practices are thought to have led to increases. These improvements partly explain the divergence in crime trends between our two main sources. See Section 4 of our User guide to crime statistics for more information.

We are confident that victim-based crime, that makes up the majority of crime captured by the CSEW and police recorded crime, has been falling with some notable exceptions, including fraud, stalking and sexual assault. According to the CSEW, there were an estimated 3.1 million fraud incidents in the year ending December 2023, no change compared with the year ending March 2017 (when CSEW fraud estimates were first incorporated into our statistics). The CSEW also shows that the prevalence of stalking among people aged 16 to 59 years has remained flat since the year ending March 2009 while the prevalence rate for sexual assault among people aged 16 to 59 years has fluctuated between 1.5% and 3.0% over the last 18 years, with a significant increase seen between the year ending March 2014 (1.5%) and the latest data for the year ending March 2023 (2.7%). See our Crime in England and Wales bulletins for latest trends.

Our data quality framework is compiled to help inform users about the quality of crime statistics for different types of crime, and which source is thought to provide the most reliable measure. The framework is available in Section 5 of our User guide to crime statistics.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, we are undertaking an internal review of the presentation and communication of crime statistics. The review will make recommendations on how these key statistics are clearly presented to ensure the correct interpretation by users.

Help improve our understanding of how our data is used. Get in touch with your feedback on our publications at crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk

Download the data quality framework summary for selected offences table (XLSX, 13KB)

Download the data quality framework summary for selected offences table (PDF, 53KB)

More information on the quality characteristics of these data sources can be found in our Crime in England and Wales QMI.

Keep track of all our new releases for crime statistics on our Crime and Justice webpage or sign up for ONS email updates.